It has just been revealed/claimed on Sky Sports F1 during FP1 for this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix that Sir Patrick Head has returned to the Williams F1 team in an advisory capacity.
Ex-F1 driver and current Sky Sports pundit Karun Chandhok made the announcement (unofficial of course) in a dialogue with Sky F1’s ‘Mr F1’, David Croft without revealing his sources.
If he’s correct, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt him, it’s a sign that the Williams team may feel that they have hit rock bottom and have turned to Head on some sort of rescue mission to attempt to put his 30 plus years of building Williams Formula 1 cars into trying to salvage something from a season that appears lost from the outset.
Sir Patrick Head co-founded Williams Grand Prix Engineering in 1977 with Sir Frank Williams, and he went on to oversee the building of 31 Williams Formula 1 cars as Technical Director (amongst other job titles) until 2004 when he handed the role over to Sam Michael.
With cars Head had a hand in designing, Williams won 113 Grand Prix (all but one of their total number of victories) amounting to sixteen Formula 1 titles in total.
Williams go into this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix somewhat battered and bruised after a turbulent pre-season during which they had to cancel a shakedown day and skip the first two days of the official pre-season test as a result of a delay in the production of their FW42, redesign a number of parts as a result of an FIA ruling that they were illegal and cope with the departure of CTO Paddy Lowe.
A tumultuous season opening Australian Grand Prix followed with a shortage of spare parts hampering their running, contributing to a 16th and 17th place finish in the race itself.
This comes on the back of a 2018 season that proved to be Williams’ worst in their entire 40+ year history, prompting much upheaval that many hoped would lead to a turnaround in the team’s fortunes.
Sadly this failed to materialise and the team find themselves as deep in the mire today as they were in 2018.
Perhaps Head will prove to be the steady hand on the tiller the team need to move forward.
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